![]() The story was front-page news around the world, and scientists and journalists scrambled to tell the public exactly what the Higgs boson was and what it did - not always successfully. Physicists had been in pursuit of the Higgs for close to 50 years, and with the help of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, they were able to finally find near-conclusive evidence of its existence in their data. Individually, these volunteer computers aren't particularly powerful, but if you string enough of them together, their collective power can easily eclipse that of any centralized supercomputer - and often for a fraction of the cost.Follow the 4th of July at a packed press conference in Geneva, scientists at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, announced that they had found the elusive Higgs boson - the so-called God particle, credited with giving all other particles mass. Instead of relying on a single, centralized computer to perform a given task, this crowdsourced style of computing draws computational power from a distributed network of volunteers, typically by running special software on home PCs or smartphones. It's not uncommon for research institutions to pay upward of $1,000 for a single hour of supercomputer use, and sometimes more, depending on the hardware that's required.īut lately, rather than relying on big, expensive supercomputers, more and more scientists are turning to a different method for their number-crunching needs: distributed supercomputing. Supercomputer-dependent research is notoriously expensive. But that computing power comes at a price - literally. ![]() By crunching numbers and performing calculations that would take eons for us humans to complete by ourselves, they help us do things that would otherwise be impossible, like predicting hurricane flight paths, simulating nuclear disasters, or modeling how experimental drugs might effect human cells. Supercomputers are an essential part of modern science. The discovery of the Higgs boson-like particle explained for regular people, not scientists So, don’t be surprised when CERN’s troublesome admission that Higgs boson is likely a myth is cited as a reason that global warming doesn’t exist.Ī milestone in the history of particle physics: Why does matter exist?ĬERN scientists have witnessed the decay of the Higgs boson particleĬERN's 'Infinity machine' is one of the most precise measurement devices in the worldĬERN’s Large Hadron Collider is behind U2’s tour art So, what does the probable absence of the Higgs boson mean for the rest of us? Well, first, it means we, as a people, remain as far as ever from discovering how our universe came into existence - a question humanity has been trying to answer presumably since the beginning of our own creation.Īnother, less profound, but far more obnoxious, outcome is that people who choose to dismiss science altogether simply because it doesn’t have the all the answers (in this case, the answer to, “How did we come to exist in the first place?”) will have new ammunition for their arguments. It was through these types experiments that CERN scientists hoped they would discover the elusive Higgs boson - and which they’ve now realized that it may not exist at all. The LHC, which measures 17 miles in circumference, has been called the “Big Bang Machine” because its purpose is to collide particles together at mind-blowing speeds - much as they are believed to have collided in pre-time - enabling scientists to observe the effects of such collisions. ![]() (This is why they call it the God particle.) If discovered, Higgs boson would provide the missing link for the “standard model” of particle physics, and could even usher in all-new types of physics.ĬERN plans to build a massive particle collider that dwarfs the LHCĮverything you need to know about the Large Hadron ColliderĬhina has plans to build a particle collider that’s over triple the size of CERN’s LHC First postulated by three independent groups of physicists in the 1960s, the Higgs boson (named after Scottish physicist Peter Higgs) has been long-believed by many in the physics community to be the elementary particle responsible for sparking the Big Bang, and thus the entire universe and everything in it. In the physics world this is a big, big deal. This disappointing proclamation comes from scientists at CERN, who told the crowd at last week’s Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai, India, that their research shows a 95 percent probability that the hypothetical Higgs boson particle is nothing more than a figment of our imagination. ![]() Scientists have discovered why the infamous Higgs boson particle, also known as the “God particle,” has been so hard to find: it probably doesn’t exist. ![]()
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